The rise and fall of Mohamed Morsi, who died last week at age 67, captured the tribulation of the Arab Spring.
In her commiseration of his death, the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood operative and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman quoted the first lines of the great Arab poet Nizar Qabbani’s poem on the death of a previous Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser: “We killed you last of the prophets, it is not new to us the killing of Companions (of the Prophet) and Saints.” The words could not have been more unsuitable. A line from Shakespeare’s helpless and tragic “Hamlet” would have been more fitting.
Born to a modest family, Morsi was the product of the Nasser regime in power in 1951, with all its aspirations and disappointments. Like many of his generation, he was offered free education but given little edification. Receiving a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in engineering, he qualified for a government scholarship to complete a doctorate at the University of Southern California.
Like Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb 30 years earlier, Morsi was radicalized in America, where he was recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood. For an organization aspiring to one day rule Egypt and looking for future leaders, Morsi was an odd fit. A mediocre man with limited imagination or aspirations, he had little to offer. But the Muslim Brotherhood is not a normal political party. In a rigid hierarchical organization that does not value independent thinking but instead emphasizes blind obedience, Morsi fit perfectly. His limited talents meant a quick rise to both the Guidance Council and to Parliament, where he was elected in 2000 and served as the group’s leader there.
When the time came for the presidential elections, it was the Brotherhood’s strongman and star Khairat el-Shater who was nominated, and then, as an afterthought, just in case Shater’s nomination was rejected, Morsi’s name was put forward. The move would earn him the title of the spare tire by the Egyptian people.
As fate would have it, the spare tire became president. Shater’s candidacy was disqualified, and Morsi won the election. His presidency was plagued by endless crises: terrorist attacks in the Sinai, constantly being out-Islamized by Salafists, economic challenges, a political struggle with the opposition. But the Muslim Brotherhood’s woes were not merely material. For all its political acuity, it had failed to read Egypt’s mood. Believing its own rhetoric that Islam and the group were synonymous, it mistook Egypt’s religious conservatism for support for its project. Morsi made the same mistake, misjudging the religiosity of an army officer he elevated to the Ministry of Defense, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. He and his group would pay heavily for that mistake when Sisi would depose him in a putsch a year later.
In the end, it was the Brotherhood’s smugness that would prove its undoing. Egyptians may have been willing to cheer the previous underdog as the safe alternative at a revolutionary moment, but they could hardly tolerate that same underdog acting as their new master, attempting to govern alone and challenging the country’s sense of national identity.
Morsi’s rise and fall had been swift. He had found himself in shoes he could not fill and incapable of the imagination necessary to avert disaster. He remained till the end a Brotherhood soldier, but one without a general and one expected to act like one.
Muslim Brotherhood operatives will lament their martyr, and their cheerleaders in the West will cry for Egypt’s imagined democratic possibility, while his opponents in Egypt will settle scores with the enemy of Egypt and its identity. (He died while being tried for espionage.) In reality, Morsi was neither a hero nor a villain, but a character from a Greek tragedy whose unlikely rise and fall fate had decided.
In a Greek tragedy, heroes and villains are supposed to be remembered, but Morsi is unlikely to elicit more than a footnote in the ongoing saga of a country incapable of moving beyond its endless alternations between glory and self-pity, as the late Fouad Ajami described it.
Samuel Tadros is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and a distinguished visiting fellow in Middle Eastern studies at the Hoover Institution.
